Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Yoga Books: The Beginner's Guide to Classic Yoga by Frances Houlahan

Title: The Beginner's Guide to Classic Yoga

Author: Frances Houlahan

Published: D&S Books, 2001

Synopsis: Not just a form of exercise, Yoga helps you achieve physical, mental and spiritual well-being.Classic Yoga is an introduction to the principal Yoga postures, each with fully illustrated step-by-step instructions, and is suitable for all ages and abilities.Featuring an introduction to the history and principles of the different styles of yoga, together with advice on general health care and relaxation. (Taken from Goodreads)

Thoughts: Normally in this section I will talk about well-known or easy to find books about Yoga but today I wanted to talk about this little gem of a book. I found this book on a table of free books at the university and decided to pick it up because, hey it's a book about Yoga so I'm definitely keen to read it.

This book is such a good introduction to Yoga. There's really great colourful sections on so many different things. There was a section all about the chakras and what they mean and I thought it was the best explanation for beginner's that I have found so far.

There are sections on Yoga philosophy and the different types of Yoga. I felt like this book was just a better guide to beginning yoga than the Yoga for Dummies book was. It just had more simple explanations, the poses weren't dumbed down and it was in a nice format to look at. I'm just so impressed by this book I found on a free book table.

There were two things I wasn't a huge fan of in this book. The first was that for some of the poses it would have been better if the person was lying on a mat or standing on a mat because when you have a person surrounded by white it's hard to tell if they're lying or standing. The other thing was there was a list of healthy eating rules and one of them was don't eat food prepared in a microwave and it gave no explanation as to why this was the case and I just thought it was a strange thing to say.

I really liked The Beginner's Guide to Classic Yoga, I wasn't able to find copies online for purchase but if you ever see it anywhere when you're out and about I would definitely suggest picking it up because it's such a handy little guidebook.